Principle of neutrality

[jchw]

@ashkitten

Would your insistence on “neutrality” extend to shutting down other people’s efforts to change the status quo because it actively harms them? If not, I don’t see the point of this post.

The point of this post is to oppose the idea that political neutrality isn’t a good principle, even if it is not always possible to remain neutral, and to try to fight the notion that the idea of wanting to remain neutral is necessarily an endorsement of status quo.

@rhendric

But I want to run this past you, because it’s been sitting in my head for months while the sponsorship debate happened, and I think it’s a useful counterpoint to your thinking about the relationship between ‘neutrality’ and ideology.

Imagine you’re with a group of four of your friends and you’re deciding where to order dinner from. And you sort of talk noncommittally about options until someone proposes the dumpling place down the street. Four of you are in favor. But then Ari pipes up that she hates the food there. It just doesn’t agree with her. She doesn’t want the group to order from there anymore.

In my experience, it would be profoundly weird for the group to say, well, sorry Ari, but majority wants dumplings so stop making this about you.

It would be profoundly weird for the group to interrogate Ari at length about what exactly is so objectionable about the dumpling place, and what even is a dumpling, and can you classify all restaurants by whether they serve any dumplings or not, before agreeing to order from somewhere else.

It would be profoundly weird for someone in the group to start arguing that we can’t have restaurants get vetoed by group members because what if Ben decides that he doesn’t like pizza, and what if Criss objects to the salad shop, and if we allowed that then we wouldn’t get any food at all.

And it would be profoundly weird, in my opinion, to call any of those reactions ‘neutrality’ with respect to restaurants, or ‘neutrality’ with respect to members of the friend group. I would describe someone as restaurant-neutral if their reaction is to say, okay, no big deal, let’s pick another restaurant. I would describe someone as person-neutral if they would extend the same accommodations to Ari’s preferences as they would to any other member of the group. Fighting that hard for the dumpling place is, uh, being pro-dumplings. Obviously.

And sure, I guess this whole line of thinking is an ‘ideology’, but I don’t think it’s a radical one. More to the point, doing a not-profoundly-weird thing here doesn’t involve taking a stance along ideological lines. It involves considering Ari’s reaction to be more important than an insistence on majority rule or not reconsidering an initial choice or what have you when there are other options available and it’s relatively easy to take one.

So if that’s what you mean by ‘neutral’, I’m all for it. But a lot of people seem to use the word ‘neutral’ to describe the other thing. Which I find profoundly weird, but if that’s how the word’s going to be used, I’m against it.

I think anybody would agree that one would just simply try to find a compromise; It would be weird if everyone dug their heels in, mainly because the stakes are so low. To be honest, I can’t really picture any reasonable person having an earnest debate about this, so I don’t really think much “neutrality” of a discussion comes into the picture. It would seem pretty immature to debate it in the first place!

When it comes to the sponsorship debacle, I have a leaning but I’m not really strongly on one side or the other. My personal stance, having read everything that I have and thought it over, is that it would be completely reasonable to decide to decline a sponsor on the basis that the foundation wishes to uphold a set of principles, and the view is that an association with said organization is simply too counter to those principles to have in any form. That said, I feel that a policy decision like this needs a lot of thought put into it, and isn’t something that should be done lightly. There’s a finite number of sponsors out there, and I definitely want the list of Nix sponsors to grow rather than shrink. I don’t want to create even more debate, but I definitely fear e.g. the potential loss of sponsors if sponsors were declined based on their public affiliation in ongoing military conflicts worldwide, some of which don’t even fall directly on typical political boundaries.

I really don’t want to spur even more debate on the specifics. (Sorry; I really wanted to stick to the analogy, but I couldn’t stretch it far enough.) But, I think there is some implication that people who are not in favor of declining a sponsorship are acting in bad faith, or at least, acting petty or unreasonably, like someone refusing to just get something else to eat instead of dumplings, but I just don’t see it that way. There is definitely more at stake here than what to eat for lunch, and it will definitely have broader implications than stomach problems.

I hope things can be resolved in a way that makes everyone feel happy to contribute to NixOS and Nix, but it still stands that the best solution ‘in principle’ is not necessarily going to be the one that makes the most people happy, and that’s the bitter reality that we’re faced with. Now that this is a whole big ordeal, any solution is going to make some contingent unhappy, making it feel a bit like a trolley problem. I’m still hoping for the best.